bhobba said
Yes the bottom 7 bits are thrown away but that is usually below the noise floor of most recordings, and dither is used to make it effectively the same as the 24 bit recording anyway,
TANSTAFL: Dither increases resolution and noise, you can get more resolution with dither, but you also increase the noise floor. You can't get 24 bits of S/N in 16 bits with simple dither - you can use noise shaping to get more S/N in a small part of the frequency band (e.g. 30kHz @120dB S/N with DSD) but not over the whole frequency band (e.g. 20kHz with a 44.1k or even 96k sample rate.)
Remember that quantization noise (over a given frequency band) goes down 6dB for each extra bit / sample and only 3dB for each doubling of the sample rate…
24/48k sounds a lot better than 16/96k or even 16/192k.
bhobba said
Yes the bottom 7 bits are thrown away but that is usually below the noise floor of most recordings, and dither is used to make it effectively the same as the 24 bit recording anyway,
This is the same argument the developers of MP3 made; you do not need the information we are removing because you can not hear it anyway. Anyone here believe this?
Those 7 bits are precisely that which constitutes a high resolution recording. In fact, many find adding more bits (44.1/24, for example) has greater beneficial sonic impact than increasing the sample rate (88.2/16, for example).
Substituting these critically important 7 bits with noise (dither) does not result in a high resolution recording. Weird, huh?
Consider also that jitter is vanishingly low level noise. Yet, as all of us who have upgraded our DirectStreams with Ted’s new firmwares, it is easy to hear the improvements made by reducing jitter even further. That is, noise is not high resolution; it is contrary to high resolution. Noise is a Bad Thing.
I still think Nielsen's report is incorrect. There seems to be some glaring contractions if you look at it's report when you compare it to numbers Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, ect put out last year regarding streams. For instance the Nielsen report cites 5.44 billion streams for Drake in 2016, while Spotify alone cites 4.7 billion streams all by itself. That doesn't even take into account Apple Music, Youtube, Pandora, ect. I don't see how they only came up with 5.44 billion when Spotify alone already has 4.7 billion.
Spotfiy alone in 2015 was processing nearly a billion streams a day. That right there is already over the number Nielsen is coming up with and that was in 2015. As we know streaming is up from 2015. There is something wrong with their report. Plain and simple.
Either way, this chart explains it all and proves my point about how little CD/Vinyl sales matter:
Again, you are completely missing the point. You claim: “There’s practically no physical media being manufacturers (sic)”
This is patently untrue.
No one questions that streaming and downloads are important. But again, the bulk of streaming is low-resolution. Accordingly, those of us interested in better sound care about CDs. This may well not matter to you.
Similarly, since audiophiles care about CDs (and SACDs, etc,) whether of not MQA gets a foothold in this market matters. Again, this may not matter to you. But this does not change the reality of the situation.
To annoy everyone with another automotive analogy: the market is dominated by heavy, ponderous SUVs; dream-crushing minivans, pick-ups, and appliance-like front wheel drive sedans (the automotive equivalent of streaming). The enthusiast is uninterested in these, but rather in the thriving performance car market.
These vehicles make up a small proportion of sales, but remain as a meaningful portion of the market for manufactures. GM typically makes between 12,000 to 35,000 Corvettes each year. A minuscule percentage of the market. But important and heavily supported by both GM and the enthusiast.
You seem to want to take me quite literally. Of course there are still physical CD sales happening, but comparatively speaking it’s a small amount. That pie chart I posted sourced from the RIAA shows that quite well. Physical revenue accounts for less than one quarter of total revenue. If I were a record label I’d care more about the 75%+ market and where it was heading. And this brings me back to my original point, in that the music industry doesn’t care about physical albums because they are a small amount of the pie and that piece of pie will continue to get smaller over the next several years, whereas streaming and downloads will continue to grow. And of course I care about quality. Tidal (and Spotify extremely soon) offer lossless bit-perfect output CD quality streaming with over 40+ million songs. MQA will become prominent with streaming services for obvious reasons. I’m not arguing that MQA is better than lossless downloads. I never have been.
To my other point, because there’s no new physical standard that needs to be adhered to that necessitates new or proprietary hardware be utilized for the format, streaming and lossless downloads can live quite harmoniously due to the simpler method of decoding these various formats in the software domain. I’ll cite the Bridge II update to support MQA here. Digital makes things much easier and often times less expensive for manufacturers to adopt formats. PS Audio didn’t need to invest in R&D in a new bridge to support MQA. But if MQA were a new optical format, it may have very well needed to.
All we have is your literal word and your repeated stance. You had endless opportunities to clarify.
PS Audio didn't need to invest in R&D in a new bridge to support MQA. But if MQA were a new optical format, it may have very well needed to.
Your forgetting MQA initially demanded that its technology be physically incorporated into DACs at manufactures' expense, with MQA having final approval as to whether the DAC met MQA's requirements. When this model of world domination failed, MQA switched to software uncoding.
Physical revenue accounts for less than one quarter of total revenue.
. . . the music industry doesn’t care about physical albums.
Every business cares desperately about 25% of its revenue. And if the industry did not care about CDs, they would not have produced over 50 million last year.
Additionally, the quality of the average CD is very high. It also is not uncommon for CDs to contain music not readily available as a download or streaming, especially not in 44/16 or better. CDs are currently the entry-level high performance medium for enthusiasts.
It also is not uncommon for CDs to contain music not readily available as a download or streaming, especially not in 44/16 or better.
Do you have a source for this? Is there some kind of objective data that supports this claim? I’d be interested in knowing if Tidal’s lossless catalog is, indeed, not lossless to the master but only CDs are.
I am afraid you misread my statement; the operative phrase is “music not readily available as a download .”
There is a good deal of music available on CD only, and not on any download or streaming source. A good deal of classical music falls into this category. If it is available, the music is often only available at decreased resolution. That is, it is easy to stream Adele; not so easy, Miah Persson.
With respect to Tidal, I hope if they represent a given offering as lossless this is indeed the case.
However, I can understand some may be skeptical of Tidal’s representations given that HDTracks, and others, presented a number of downloads as high resolution when they were merely upsampled Redbook. Unfortunately there were SACDs made from second-generation masters and other inferior sources as well.
Paul & Ted. I read the positive feedback article w Andreas Kochs. Everyone should. If goes to the marketing question I asked above and further confirms my thoughts about licensing fees.
Here is my issue. I like DSD. I like the fact that the DS is a DSD solution. I feel that what I want …what I care about …gets diluted by an initiative like this. Possibly to the point of extinction. I’m not interested in that nor am I interested in supporting it as I feel it is a complete step backwards. My opinion. I’m selfish I know.
From an optimist’s point of view, vinyl is still alive, tape is still alive, hi res PCM is still alive, DSD is certainly still alive. MP3 didn’t really change any of that, tho it did shake up the music industry. Even if MQA sticks around it really won’t displace any of this. No one is going to want to record new things they care about in a lossy format (with it’s limited resolution) when they could use very high res PCM, DSD (or something we don’t know about yet.)
Elk said
It also is not uncommon for CDs to contain music not readily available as a download or streaming, especially not in 44/16 or better.
Do you have a source for this? Is there some kind of objective data that supports this claim? I'd be interested in knowing if Tidal's lossless catalog is, indeed, not lossless to the master but only CDs are.
Anecdotally, I buy CDs about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time I'm trying to buy a piece of music I don't have yet because I can't find a 16/44.1 or better digital copy. With a little less accuracy, I'd say that about 1/4 of my CDs don't seem to be available at all digitally.
From an optimist’s point of view, vinyl is still alive, tape is still alive, hi res PCM is still alive, DSD is certainly still alive. MP3 didn’t really change any of that, tho it did shake up the music industry. Even if MQA sticks around it really won’t displace any of this. No one is going to want to record new things they care about in a lossy format (with it’s limited resolution) when they could use very high res PCM, DSD (or something we don’t know about yet.)
This is exactly my point and the one I've been saying from the beginning. I think this is especially so when there is no proprietary hardware needed to support this new format. As Tidal has shown us, MQA can be unfolded via software.There's no reason not to think that all of these formats can't (or won't) be available for consumption or that any one of them will completely diminish the others. It's mainly the convenience and price of entry that makes the streaming market so enticing and popular.
For timm and badbeef – Roon supports multiple output technologies including the Squeezebox protocol. So my SBT is seen by Roon as an output device, and Roon is seen by the SBT as a LMS without the ability to browse the library or playlists. All the playback selection is via Roon apps, though the SBT’s IR remote works for play/pause/skip.
I’m running the “EDO” extension which disables the SBT’s internal DAC and allows for up to 24/192 PCM audio streams to be played via USB, coax and optical. DSD64 fits inside a 24/176.4 SPDIF encoding (DSD over PCM, or DoP) which the DS DAC knows how to decode.
When I’m playing DSD content from Roon my DS DAC shows “DSD64” as the format and “1 bit” as the sample depth. It’s a bit-perfect playback path.
No one is going to want to record new things they care about in a lossy format (with it’s limited resolution) when they could use very high res PCM, DSD (or something we don’t know about yet.)
One would think.
I am concerned however that if MQA gains traction, especially on streaming sources, it may become the de facto “best” readily available. MP3 (and AAC) still is the standard streaming format ,even with bad sound and even though available bandwidth readily supports full resolution.
I am concerned however that if MQA gains traction, especially on streaming sources, it may become the de facto “best” readily available. MP3 (and AAC) still is the standard streaming format ,even with bad sound and even though available bandwidth readily supports full resolution.
Dvorak. That is awesome. I did not know that Roon and the SBT would ‘see’ each other. Are you hard wired via Ethernet to the SBT or using wifi? Or do you have optical out of your pc?? Does Roon and the SBT connect right out of the box like this? I know about the EDO plugin for the SBT. Thanks. Sorry for the off topic but this will be the end. Promise.
